Advertising is important to all businesses but presents unique problems for the owners of small or local establishments. Media advertising is expensive and must compete for attention with the ads of others, most of whom are likely not local, and requires a potential customer to be watching television or reading internet programming to become aware of the ad. Likewise, print advertising requires a potential customer to read the ad in order to become aware of it.
Point of sale advertising can inform a customer of special sales or offers if the customer is already in the store but does not have the impact or coverage of media or print advertising.
Local or “neighborhood” businesses are often found in neighborhoods and strip malls comprising a number of small businesses sharing a common parking lot or along streets bordering residential neighborhoods. The term “neighborhood business” is intended to identify individual locations, not necessarily businesses limited to a selected amount of commercial activity. For example, franchised store locations may do a high volume of business yet are “neighborhood” because much of their business comes from customers living nearby.
It is an advantage for neighborhood businesses to provide information to their customers about other neighborhood businesses. A customer in one local store will thus see information about another local store that is nearby, perhaps in the same strip mall, that will prompt the customer to stop at that second local store to purchase something the customer otherwise may not have chosen to do. Store owners and employees also benefit from learning about the stores located near theirs, making it more likely that customers at one store will be referred to another, nearby store, benefiting the neighborhood as a whole.
One familiar type of neighborhood business is the shop that provides dry cleaning services for clothing. A typical dry cleaning shop accepts clothing, cleans or launders the clothing (often on the premises) and then hangs the clothing on racks until the customer comes to claim it. Often the clothing racks are constructed as material handling conveyors constructed to move the cleaned clothing to a pickup area within the store where it is retrieved by the store operator and given to the customer.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,823,236 (Speckhart, et al.) shows one type of material handling conveyor made up of individual links pivotally joined together with the links providing sites upon which to hang clothing and a motor and associated controls to drive the conveyor thus moving the clothing from a storage site to a pickup site. In many dry cleaning shops the pickup site is the front of the store where the customer waits while the store operator runs the conveyor to bring the customer's cleaning order to the operator who, in turn, gives the clothing to the customer. While the conveyor is running it is observable by the customer and other customers waiting to pick up or drop off their own clothing. The conveyor draws attention by its movement and the sound associated with it.
Another feature of such material handling conveyors is their ability to be constructed to accommodate the interior spaces of such shops, with the conveyor links able to travel horizontally or on an upward or downward slope and around corners as required. As an example, the conveyor may angle upward to create space below it for equipment or personnel, and may angle downward to provide a site for shop workers to hang finished orders on selected conveyor links.
There is a need to provide local businesses with a simple and inexpensive way to inform their customers about other local businesses and their services. Furthermore, there is a need to provide such information systems in forms which make it easy and inexpensive to display such information and to change the display when the information changes. Moreover, in some cases there is a need for such information systems to be applied to existing store operating equipment rather than to require dedicated, single use display devices. Additionally, there is a further need for such information systems to be applied to existing material storage and delivery systems as well as to newly manufactured such systems.